Category Archives: Psychedelic

This song is so great. One of the greatest songs that ever came out of the 1960’s Cultural Revolution.

I saw this group when they were called the Jefferson Starship in 1973 at the Shriner’s Auditorium in downtown LA near USC. Pot smoking was a pretty big deal with society back then, and LA had some super-hardline sheriff whose name escapes me now. He was famous for taking a very hard line on marijuana use, especially at rock concerts. When we walked in, they handed us flyers from the sheriff saying,

This venue is not a haven for marijuana smoking.

Other text then followed. I think it said if you smoke pot here, you are going to be arrested and prosecuted. Those flyers were all over the hallways on the ring of the auditorium, scuttering around on the floors.

Inside, the pot smoking was subdued, but it went on anyway. Well, I and my 16 year old friends snuck pot into the auditorium and also smoked it. This was a bit hard to do, as you might get searched before you went in.

There weren’t any LAPD there. There were these private plainclothes security guards instead, but they were hauling people off for pot smoking nevertheless. I remember this long haired guy next to us took some crushed ice out of his drink and balled it up into a sort of snowball. Then he hurled it as hard as he could at the security guard down below. He beaned him right in the head! Our whole section erupted with cheers!

Good times!

Anyway a good time was had by all, and I got stoned out of my gourd. Back then when I first started smoking pot, marijuana trips were like these bizarro space journeys to another planet or another world.

I think the Starship came out, held up one of the flyers and told the sheriff to fuck off or something. They were very good at that time. Early Starship was still excellent. They were led by a guy named Marty Ballin who was just fantastic. I think later on, they tended to peter out; however, the Starship did write a few good songs, the names of which elude me now.

The whole audience erupted when the first eerie chords of Go Ask Alice filled the room.

From the same album in 1980, Scary Monsters. Great stuff. The original punk psychedelic music!

Check out these lyrics:

She asked me to stay and I stole her room
She asked for my love and I gave her a dangerous mind
Now she’s stupid in the street and she can’t socialize
Well I love the little girl and I’ll love her till the day she dies

Oh yeah! Moar!

I get tired of the whole “David Bowie is gay” argument.

Though he was into that for a while. In 1974, I met a guy who said he knew a groupie who had had sex with Bowie. The groupie was female, and she said there was a another male there with them (it was a threesome). She said Bowie seemed more interested in the guy than in her!

In recent years, Bowie blows off the question. He says he was just into bisexuality because it was some sort of a fad at the time. However, it is true that Angela Bowie caught David and Mick Jagger in bed together at one point. The Rolling Stones song Angie is said to be about her.

Iggy Pop lived with Bowie for a while in Berlin, I believe in the late 1970’s when Bowie was way out there on cocaine binging for a while. He nearly got psychotic from heavy use of the drug.

Pop also blew off questions about Bowie being gay or bi by saying it really wasn’t important.

The following is a paraphrase of his words:

“That man got more pussy than any man I have ever known. From waitresses to heiresses, they all wanted him. They wouldn’t leave him alone. The phone was always ringing, and it was always a woman on the other end wanting David.”

If living like that makes you a “fag,” I might just have to be a “fag” myself! Sounds like a lot of fun. You go David!

Voynich Manuscript, hands down. Also one of the world’s great mysteries. Nothing about this book seems to make any sense at all, not the bizarre, undeciphered language, code, or cipher, not the weird drawings of plants that don’t exist, not the astronomy based on no known astrological system, not the cosmology based on no cosmological system ever encountered, nothing.

The date it was written is thought to be around 1500, but the author or authors are unknown, and the subject of much speculation. None of the theories really completely add up or make sense. It’s just one gigantic, endless pile of weirdness, the solution to which went to its grave with the author(s).

You can download the whole book in pdf here. I haven’t bothered, but some of you arcana buffs may wish to give it a whirl.

Tired of Hemingway’s short, clipped, sentences? Have no fear. A 2,000 page single sentence in this book will cure of that forever and make you come running back to Hem or Bukowski.

One of the things we love about English are the lack of those annoying monosyllabic words that the Asian languages have. Our words can be quite long. For instance, this book has a single word that is 750 pages long. You can live, die, get resurrected and still never make it to the next word. Talk about leaving you hanging on every word.

Erikson was a leader of the great pyschedelic band, The Thirteenth Floor Elevators. Check out Roky Erikson and the Aliens, The Evil One, a cult classic album from 1981, recorded when he was very mentally ill. It’s great stuff, man!